Had a great weekend at COTA! MVP TrackTime ran this event as a 3-day weekend. Friday morning was mostly lost to weather (ice started coming down during my first session, and then all the second sessions were cancelled while the track was slick), but COTA gave us an extra hour on Sat+Sun to make up for the lost sessions, which was really awesome of them. Got to meet Mike (the Powerdercoater) for the first time, guru came up from Houston Saturday and brought us BBQ for lunch, and then he brought back some of the local Z-club crowd on Sunday to hang out.
The track is ridiculously technical and complex, and has both faster straights and tighter corners than I've seen before. It was pretty scary until I started getting comfortable with it. The elevation changes are dramatic as well. Even after staring at videos of the track for hours, I wasn't prepared for how those look and feel in person. It would probably take many more weekends there before I really started to get the nuances of this track down, but that's unlikely to happen given how expensive events there tend to be. Still, it was well worth going once and giving it a spin. Every sector is exhilarating when you nail it just right (or at least, as just right as I was going to get for this weekend!). The only remotely boring part of this track is the back straight from 11 -> 12, but that flies by quickly and it's a good chance for tons of passing to sort out trains. Honestly, I think I really need that straight as a breather between the complex stuff happening before and after it anyways.
No instructors, so I watched Mike Skeen's video from some practice laps last year in a Porsche over and over to try to have some idea about my lines. I eventually got down to 1:41.76 on a clean traffic-free lap, and that's about as good as I can do COTA currently. I had a back-to-back pair of clean laps on the session after that one and they were also high 1:41.xx's.
I kept it on the pavement all weekend, and I only had one maybe-spin in my final session Sunday that I blame on getting tired and sloppy. I thought it qualified as a spin, but they didn't flag me, I guess because I didn't quite get fully perpendicular to the track during my mad rush of poor over-corrections? Who knows, but no flag so I kept on trucking
No true equipment problems, but lots of things were showing signs of abuse - notably my trans fluid was fairly burnt out by the end of Sunday, shifts were getting sloppy. And some of the little surface checking on my front rotors was turning into real cracks after my final session. I don't think I can go another full weekend on these rotor rings. COTA is tough on brakes, be prepared if you go!
Anyways, all I've exported for now is my fastest lap. I plan to edit up a highlights/incidents video later as well with the interesting stuff from my footage.